The book club I run just finished our second book, If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin, and I’m here with a couple thoughts about it!

I’m not going to even pretend to write about book club discussion topics anymore, because it’s restrictive in a way that serves nobody. But I AM going to keep writing Substacks about book club books until it becomes impractical or unpleasant (not yet!). There’s a depth or type of thinking I can only do in writing.

So without further ado: the thoughts! Overall I really enjoyed If Beale Street Could Talk. It felt refreshing to read after Frankenstein, which was 99% summary and speeches. Beale was the inverse — 99% scene and conversations! Almost exclusively scene!

Which leads me to my first take:

1. Sometimes there was too much scene!

There’s one part in particular, right after Tish non-verbally tells her mom she’s pregnant, when there’s dialogue AND narration about how they’re going from the kitchen to a bedroom for some privacy and maybe Tish can lie down. Tish lies down and then gets up and takes off her coat and lies BACK down. I was kind of like, wait, let us not forget our useful friend summary, and our other useful friend, “I took a nap.”

Still, I’d much rather a bit too much scene than too much summary, in the end. Scene gets me emotionally invested in a story, and James Baldwin is a master of a long, realistic scene with exciting stage directions. (Spit! Slap!)

I’m almost like, sir, do you want to write a PLAY? But then he’s dead.

2. Was Tish… God?

Listen: She’s an omniscient narrator, describing many scenes she wasn’t present for: Sharon’s trip to Puerto Rico, some of Fonny’s time in prison, her and Fonny’s dads chatting at the bar, etc.

And she’s creating life… by being pregnant…

I don’t think this is the main thrust of the novel, but there’s a little troll here, where Baldwin has created a first-person omniscient narrator (unusual!) who dislikes church and feels specifically UNLOVED there. You know?

3. Fonny was too obviously innocent.

Fonny isn’t presented as a perfect angel (he threw Tish’s tomatoes at a wall!), but he IS presented as 100% definitely innocent of the rape he’s in prison for. He was somewhere far away when the crime happened, with two witnesses, AND he’s a good guy. At book club, I really wanted to find the one weirdo who thought Fonny did it, and I couldn’t!

I felt like James Baldwin didn’t trust the reader to trust Fonny. Part of that is the heaviness of a rape charge in a novel, because it’s like… why did the author CHOOSE to give that to you? In fiction, things don’t happen randomly.

But Fonny’s alibi is so airtight to Tish and the reader, though not to the state, that it made the story feel a little didactic to me. Systemic racism can still work hard and create obvious injustice in a slightly ambiguous situation. (I mean that police lineup where Fonny was the only black guy!)

As is, we don’t see Tish doubt Fonny’s innocence for one second. She never even speaks to a reasonable person who doubts his innocence. She deals with the cognitive dissonance of his innocence and imprisonment, which is interesting, but to me it’s even more so outside a sealed aquarium of certainty.

4. Artifice deserved more credit.

The villains of If Beale Street Could Talk, at least as much as Officer Bell, are the women of Fonny’s family, who Tish refers to as “hags.” Their main crime is enjoying the performance of “goodness” at church, even though it’s out of alignment with their private lives, where they do some secret sex stuff and rarely visit Fonny in prison. Oh, and feud with Tish’s unborn baby.

Those fake hags don’t sound fun to me either, trust. But you know what I’ve also found through living, unmentioned in this book: Artifice helps get things done.

For instance, what if Sharon had employed a bit more artifice when she went to Puerto Rico to try to persuade Fonny’s accuser to drop the charges? She played that pretty direct and confrontational, and it didn’t work. People don’t like to be politely asked to drop their rape charges in the middle of a home invasion, it turns out.

Unfortunately, I do think Fonny’s reviled mom could have handled that situation more effectively —and I thought it was a weakness of the novel that it was so outside the realm of possibility for her to go!

As written, the fans of artifice and the fans of fighting injustice were two mutually exclusive, warring factions throughout. Every woman who cares about artifice and amassing social capital also sees their perceived virtue as something to passively hoard.

I don’t know, man! There’s an alternate version of this book where at least SOME women in Fonny’s family cash in their church cred and organize the church community to fundraise and get him out on bail. And maybe they still don’t visit him at The Tombs, and that sucks! But I really think it takes all kinds to make dinner. That’s not a real idiom but it should be.

5. Tish didn’t overdo it!

She might be the purest “observer” narrator I’ve encountered who isn’t literally, physically restrained. We do see her make one big decision: to stand in front of Fonny at the tomato store to protect him from Officer Bell. It’s arguably the inciting incident of the novel.

But after that…?

She wants Fonny out of prison more than anyone, but she kind of doesn’t take the lead on that. Or on a side quest. Her boldest moves are thoughts and speech acts:

• Thinking about doing sex work

• Inviting Mrs. Hunt to come kill her [Tish’s] unborn baby (invite declined)

• Thinking about [checks notes] opening up and destroying Officer Bell’s face so they can both be free

This is not to say she does NOTHING or that she has to do more for me to like her. I love her. She’s an incredible observer. She has a solid work ethic and gets herself to the perfume store even when she feels like crap.

For a character in a novel, she just expresses herself unusually heavily through thoughts and reflection. Her actions are mostly repetitive care work — going to work, visiting Fonny, and… implicitly getting reports from more active characters? Maybe she will become a journalist one day.

6. “The system” runs on desire with nowhere good to go.

I thought a lot about why James Baldwin talks about sex and sexual urges in such granular detail in this book. Tish loses her virginity to Fonny for seven whole pages! We get a full page of a Fonny solo expedition in prison! Why?

Here’s my working hypothesis: I think there’s a submerged story here about how institutions — the church and the police force, specifically — are built on displaced sex drives.

In the world of the novel, sex is ideally an expression of love, like it is for Tish and Fonny; then it becomes sacred, in a way church wishes it was. But most of the characters can’t or won’t access that, and instead express their sex drives in unloving power play — usually by participating in the normalized BDSM baked into hierarchical institutions.

For example! Officer Bell (symbol of the police) is turned on by dominating civilians for work. Meanwhile Fonny’s mom (symbol of the church) seems to be getting an interesting sexual something out of submitting to her husband in the present, because she will ultimately dominate him in the afterlife.

Basically, I thought the novel made a case that people running around with sexual urges they don’t understand or want to understand are the ones most likely to participate in morally dubious institutions / “the system.”

I found it pretty persuasive! I’m not sure sex is THE thing that makes the world go around, but it’s huge. Top two. There’s just also money.

Linxxx

• I don’t watch Summer House but I do think this song I love is prophetic West/Amanda fanfic.

• A chatbot goes to couple’s therapy with her human lover?!?!?!?

• Welcome to heaven: the California peanut butter cup. I made that up but I did eat my first one in LA.

• A gorgeous impression of Walgreens! Like I was really there.

• If Beale Street Could Talk makes me want to give to a BAIL FUND!!! What if we all do it right now O.O

• I’d link to an Illinois bail fund but we abolished cash bail in 2023. Wooo!

• Next book club book is THE TRIAL!

I’ve been thinking about how I want this newsletter and my progeny Cool New Book Club to interact, and my v1 thought is that I’ll write about book club discussion topics here. That way anyone who couldn’t make it to IRL book club has something to read and respond to!

The club’s first book was Frankenstein, and today I’ll be covering:

• The Frankenstein main characters I liked most and least

• Frankenstein: feminist?

• Frankenstein x modern life

• Friendship chaos in Frankenstein

• Dr. Frankenstein’s sickliness

• Sexual tension between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster

• The movie vs. the book

If you, too, read Frankenstein and are overflowing with opinions and feelings, I would LOVE it if people wrote their own Frankenstein Substacks and sent them to me. Or hosted their own book clubs! (Here’s the list of book club discussion questions.) My dream is for this to all be very Open Source and Conversational.

Alrighty, here we go.

The Frankenstein main characters I liked most and least:

I’m going to focus on just the three narrators, for concision — here’s my power ranking:

1. Robert Walton: Sort of wins by default, because he’s never killed anyone, and he shows an ability to learn and grow. When we meet him, he’s on an obsessive quest to find the magnet at the North Pole — so basically, he’s looking for individualistic glory on the Frontiers of Knowledge — but by the end, he turns his ship around goes the eff home. His men want him to. He wants to see his sister. Growth! He probably mainly wins this ranking because we get to know him the least.

2. The monster: He IS a serial killer and I hold that against him, but he isn’t trying to hide it, and he can talk openly about his motivations and impact. It turns out I value self-awareness over not killing people?! I’m in danger. I also feel sympathy for the monster because a lot of his difficulties are not his fault — he didn’t ask to be born (and won’t let you hear the end of it!), or to be abandoned at birth. As Eminem would say, “Where were the parents?” A lot of this fella’s wrongdoing comes from a huge, curdled desire to connect and love.

3. Dr. Frankenstein: THISSSSS WORMY LITTLE GUY. If he has zero haters, I’m dead. He’s such an irresponsible and neglectful scientist, husband, and friend. A man constantly wallowing in self-pity about problems he caused himself! He is the king of self-sabotage and self-unawareness. Even on his deathbed, he can’t clock his greatest misstep: abandoning his creation when it first came to life. The monster never needed to become a monster, dude! No one has more deservedly died a virgin than Dr. Frankenstein.

Frankenstein: feminist?

I’ve heard that it is but I’m not so sure. Can a book be feminist if the female characters rarely appear, and when they do they’re like, “Eh, no big deal if I get wrongfully guillotined! 🤷‍♀️😇” ? I want more for them all—especially Robert’s sister, who spends the entire book being addressed and never speaking.

But I do think the core, unnatural “horror” of the novel is that a man, on his own, created a life. Dr. Frankenstein cracks immediately under the weight of that responsibility, like literally doesn’t lift a caretaking finger and falls ill for months. He only realizes YEARS later he might owe the monster some kind of guardianship, and even then he “realizes” murkily at best. Meanwhile IRL, women routinely create life and carry caretaking responsibilities, and often do a good job. (Though not all/only women, sometimes a bad job, etc.) The book brought that contrast into focus for me, which is arguably feminist.

Then AGAIN, Frankenstein doesn’t critique men in general so much as Dr. Frankenstein specifically. Other male characters would surely handle his situation better: his dad, Clerval, even the monster. (The monster would be a super-devoted dad!) So like I said, I’m on the fence.

One thing I definitely think is feminist is that Mary Shelley thought of this story and shared that with the world. It’s VERY strange! I support women being strange in public.

Frankenstein x modern life:

Reading Frankenstein in the present day, I felt like the monster was our first incel. I was struck by the parallels between his worldview and Elliot Rodger’s on a recent reread Amia Srivinivasan’s “Does anyone have the right to sex?” (loved her whole essay collection btw, banger).

The biggest parallel is that the monster and Elliot both blame their social rejection on their looks — but as Amia astutely points out, that’s probably not it:

Rodger was a creep, and it was at least partly his insistence on his own aesthetic, moral and racial superiority, and whatever it was in him that made him capable of stabbing his housemates and his friend a total of 134 times, not his failure to meet the demands of heteromasculinity, that kept women away.

I mean, YEAH. Yeah. For the monster too, his capacity to murder probably comes through in his vibes.

Frankenstein added to my concept of incels, too, because it made me consider that they might be lonely more generally for friends and human connection. The monster surely is. As much as I was disturbed that he asked for a “female companion” because she would be… literally a sex slave from birth… Frankenstein is also a very unhorny book. I think the monster’s request came mainly from wanting a family.

Could incels want that… too? Maybe the fixation on sex in incel culture (which I don’t know that well) (guys I’m coming out as not an incel) is spackling over some secret similar dreams of happy family life, or vibrant friend groups…

It could be more vulnerable to talk about those kinds of dream in public, because you can’t achieve lasting loving relationships with violence. So when you can’t get them, there’s no tinge of choice or agency. You’re not abstaining from crime… you’re just purely flopping.

A possibility! If you’re an incel who has read Frankenstein please write in with your thoughts here, genuinely.

Friendship chaos in Frankenstein:

Every narrator in Frankenstein has an intense relationship with friendship. These men yearn for friends and they also don’t totally get what friends are, which might be why isolation stalks them all throughout the book — almost like some kind of monster???

Like, here’s an early passage that kind of captures everyone’s issue. This is about Robert Walton’s dad and his friend Beaufort, who moved to a new city due to financial troubles:

My father loved Beaufort with the truest friendship… Beaufort had taken effectual measures to conceal himself, and it was ten months before my father discovered his abode.

Hm. Is that friendship or stalking?

And then here we have the monster seeing William, a brother/cousin/idk of Dr. Frankenstein’s in the woods:

Suddenly, as I gazed on him, an idea seized me, that this little creature was unprejudiced, and had lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity. If, therefore, I could seize him, and educate him as my companion and friend, I should not be so desolate in this peopled earth. [bold mine]

He proceeds to seize him by the NECK and strangle him to death. There’s a reason normal people don’t find their friends through a SURPRISE SEIZE!

This forceful idea of friendship also pops up towards the end of the book: Dr. Frankenstein tells Robert he can’t be his friend — Victor’s already “done” friends (weird but okay) — and Robert persists in calling the doctor his friend. It’s nuts! I wrote “rape culture!” in the margins.

On reread this all really echoes the incel stuff above. You can’t take a sustainable, reciprocal, genuinely caring relationship by force! To have a fun, caring friend you also need to also BE a fun, caring friend who knows the difference between socializing, nursing a rando back to health in the Arctic, and murder. (Some call these The Big Three.)

Clerval is a really good friend, though! Very nurturing to Dr. Frankenstein. Not all men, etc.

His name sounds horrible on the tongue, though… like an STD. CLERVAL, ew.

Dr. Frankenstein’s sickliness:

Listen, I trust almost everyone when they say they are sick. Dr. Frankenstein??! The man’s not sick. I know he “died” of his “sickness,” textually, but I’m pretty sure he has the same guilt-masquerading-as-fever issue Raskolnikov had all through Crime & Punishment. In my professional, medical opinion (I work in marketing but shhhh), Dr. Frankenstein would have lived a long healthy life if he had been open with or apologized to anyone he loved, ever.

Sexual tension between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster:

Is it there? They sure are always thinking about each other, and one is always chasing while the other one flees. In my experience (especially when the pursuer switches midway?) this is a sign of dysfunctional sexual desire.

BUT. I actually think Dr. Frankenstein is so intensely avoidantly attached to this life that he is basically asexual. And then I think the monster just wants Dr. Frankenstein to give him a hug.

The new Guillermo del Toro movie vs. the book:

I thought the Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein adaptation was odd. He clearly read the book — the monster ate berries, and no one but Mary Shelley thinks monsters eat berries — but his version of the story is full of people dying in gun battles and CGI wolf attacks. There’s so much conflict and fire onscreen!

This didn’t sit totally right with me. I thought the main message of Frankenstein was that violence can look like negative space, too — you can kill obliviously, by neglecting people out in the cold, and never even fully notice you did it.You just happen to be kinda sick all the time. You just randomly have an 8-foot monster following you around… so unlucky!

Q for readers:

If you read Frankenstein, what did you think? Did anyone think Dr. Frankenstein was a solid guy? (Guillermo del Toro sure didn’t lol.)

If you didn’t read Frankenstein, was this tolerably or INtolerably boring? I guess if it’s intolerably boring you prob won’t get down here.

Linxxx

• I DON’T WANNA BE A HOOOMEWRECKER!

• Mary Shelley’s life story makes Ozzy Osbourne look twee.

• This New York Turkish coffee psychic puts on an amazing, very color-coordinated show. Highly rec! Even though he claims I’m about to fall in love with a “stubby” man, ugh. STUBBY?!

• My new bike bell is so fun! Like banging a gavel.

• The new Ohio Love Is Blind season is extremely, weirdly good. Vic & Christine forever <3

I’ve never been big on new year’s resolutions, because I think you can change your life whenever. But for me, the start of 2026 coincided with a powerful urge to start something new. The typical new projects of people my age — getting married, having a kid, buying a house — are not what I’ve got going on at the moment, so I needed a kind of strange new project.

I used to put this type of energy into writing, and I still do! Look at me writing right now, wow. But I wanted this project to be a next-generation Mae thing—SOCIAL, creative, energizing, and “so me-coded that it repulses people I wouldn’t vibe with, just by existing.” (<<< I said this to my therapist and she said “That’s a great goal!”, beaming with confidence I could repulse many people. A confidence I share!)

Anyway… I decided to start a book club. I’m going to bullet out the deets:

• Name: Cool New Book Club, kinda like Now That’s What I Call Music! — you have to give it a compliment to speak on it >:)

• What it is: An in-person book club based in Logan Square (in Chicago)

• First book: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

• First meeting: Wednesday, February 18 (venue / time TBD — join the venue convo here)

• How to join if you’re in Chicago: Follow on Instagram and/or sign up for emails

Though it hasn’t met yet, the book club is already very me-coded, in the sense that I make REELS of my OWN FACE and post them on the book club Instagram. This involves many firsts and almost-firsts for me: filming myself, buying a tripod because my fingers hurt from filming myself, continuously confronting my own freaky affect and facial proportions. It’s a journey! I guess someone has to be able to fit a sofa in their wide wide mouth, and that’s why I’m here.

Why am I doing this? Why in Logan Square? What kind of books do I like to read? I have a hypothesis that answering these questions will help people care about the book club enough to read the book—so here we go.

Why I’m starting a book club as opposed to another type of meetup thing:

I LOVE BOOK CLUBS. I love to laugh in a book club. I love to respectfully disagree in a book club. I love to make a book club read Taipei by Tao Lin, and find out I’m the only person who likes that book (at least in my book club).

Book clubs motivate me: I read War & Peace because I thought my friend was reading it too and the slog would culminate in a book club sesh. She actually never started it, lol.

Book clubs attract people I think are cool: I met a cherished friend through book club and she let me be a bridesmaid in her wedding!

It also feels telling that I wasn’t able to describe my ideal conversation in this old Substack without mentioning book club (“Let’s book club our subjectivity!”).

Who inspired me to start a book club:

Biggest influences here by FAR are Claire and Ashley, co-hosts of Good Noticings (formerly Celebrity Memoir Book Club). I listen to their podcast and Patreon podcast religiously, and they’ve inspired me in a few ways:

• They hosted an Audition book club event with Katie Kitamura in New York, and I wanted to go so badly that I considered moving to New York so I could go to more events like that in the future. This helped me identify the powerful book club yearning inside of me.

• They’re very open about what it was like to start their podcast / community / events empire, and how the most important thing is to start, and if no one cares about your thing at first, that’s normal. This has helped me start and stick with this book club for more than two (2) weeks.

• They share a lot of thoughts on books and articles, and a lot of funny short-form videos about like… learning new things from Bug (Ashley’s dog) and looking like Kelsey Anderson, but worse (I really loled at this video) (they of course both look lovely). The videos make me care about their book recs more! So now I’m making short-form videos to support this book club, even though I’m historically a very off-camera person.

Other people who have inspired me:

• My friends Mel and Jeff (who live together and are lovers) — They are great and creative hosts. I can never fully get on their level because Jeff is an amazing chef, but I can try in my own low-food way!

• Robby Hoffman — She is an opinionated, borderline hostile comedian who hates new towels and men having birthday parties. I saw her live this summer and the feeling of being in a room of people who love Robby… while she told straight men in the audience that they were gay, VIGOROUSLY… was wonderful??? (She’s gay… useful context.) I have some hard-wired beliefs that people who “create community” have to be bland, opinion-free smiley face emojis brought to life, and the way she brings people together disrupted that for me and helped me move on this project. I’m not as aggro as Robby, but I’m not sweet!

• My managers past and present — Leadership people often say that things will happening before it’s a 100% sure thing. I used to worry that they were confused; now I suspect that’s what leading is. You carry the uncertainty without barfing it all over everyone (“Please sir, do you think my book club will happen???”) and you try your dangedest to make it happen. Very relevant here!

Why it’s based in Logan Square:

Because selfishly… I want more friends who live near me? I have more faith a quorum of people like to read in Logan Square than in, like, Wrigleyville (sorry). I’ve also lived in Logan Square so long that I’m more effective at tasks here than elsewhere. I was biking around flyering the other day thinking, the stretch of Milwaukee from California to Kimball is my effing Sherlockian mind palace. I am remembering sweet tiny apartments my friends lived in circa 2011!

What I like to read:

My two favorite books of all time are coming-of-age novels. BILDUNGSROMANS (roma?) if you will. I have reread them many times and interpreted them different ways, but they always ring so true on a character level, and on a craft level they are both built like freaking dovetail joints even when it seems like they’re meandering:

• Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

• The Idiot, by Elif Batuman

Some other types of books I love include…

Formally funky novels (often about theater!):

• Audition, Katie Kitamura, obviously

• Trust Exercise, Susan Choi

• The Biography of X, Catherine Lacey

Old Russian novels involving a lot of shame:

• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

• Crime & Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Novels with intense non-sexual intimacy:

• Sula, Toni Morrison

• Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters

Novels with intense SEXUAL intimacy:

• All Fours, Miranda July

• Another Country, James Baldwin

Midnight’s Children (couldn’t get this to fit in a category with other books but it’s about the partition of India with some magical realism and iirc a lot of pickles):

• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

I also love a juicy article and used to listen to the Longform podcast religiously, RIP.

How I like to read:

Creatively! I try to read with some baseline distrust of most narrators, an eye on what’s not getting said, and another eye (when I read I guess I have three eyes and the third eye’s actually reading the text?) on thematically related stuff I’ve read elsewhere. I’m not always successful, as you can see in #9 here, but I try! You can see my attempts at creatively reading Audition and Anna Karenina on this very Substack.

Amazing creative readers include Mary Ruefle (see “My Emily Dickinson” in Madness, Rack & Honey — damn) and Game of Roses (the text they creatively read is The Bachelor).

What I’ve learned about myself and the world from starting this book club:

• A lot of people want to read Frankenstein and never have. Jacob Elordi is clearly a part of this. A lovely-looking lad.

• Being myself takes practice. When I started making videos of myself, I thought the first take would always be the “best” or “realest,” but it’s actually the most convoluted and camera shy. I revise my personal writing a lot to make it legible and aligned with what I actually think, and I don’t know why I thought video would be different. It’s the same!

• Next time I flier, I need to bring tape. That way you can hang fliers in front windows. Bulletin boards with pins are almost universally in the back of the establishment by the bathrooms.

• People who tell me I have a “dry” or “deadpan” sense of humor are RIGHT. As a guy at a bar put it one time, “You’re very dry… not funny. JUST dry.” Yes, sir. My affect is so flat I’m missing my own attempts at humor. I am the rare woman who actually might benefit… from smiling… more?! It hurts to say and yet.

• I can draw a penguin that’s really recognizably a penguin. Even to a viewer I have not prepped in advance! Empowering.

• I talk really slow and use “and” as my filler word. This creates multi-minute run-on sentences in my vids. I need to speed up and let sentences end. But how do other people talk fast? Is it drugs?

• Strangers are nice. People have really come out of the woodwork to support this little book club! Thanks <3

Question for you all

If you’ve ever been in a book club (or other community discussion) that you really liked — why did you like it? Were there any rituals or replicable practices that made it great?

Reply and let me know! Looking for ideas for how to run the actual book club meeting :)

Linxxx

• The ICE situation in Minneapolis right now is dire as hell. Some non-profit and mutual aid links; I gave here.

• Cried laughing at this TikTok + comments. Did Marvin Gaye found Wikipedia?

• I was recently stopped at an intersection and my bike speaker algorithmically started playing this in the dead of winter. To play it for the public wearing insulated gloves… just special.

• This kinda gives Frankenstein idk. Remixing and reimagining the body…?

• If you want to join my book club, follow on Instagram and/or sign up for emails!

Hi! Here’s a list of things that brought me joy this year, mostly music and books and movies, plus some chaos items. Be influenced! Revile my preferences! A little of both! It’s all fun.

***

1. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

This novel didn’t come out this year, but I read it this year and loved it. It’s a lot about journaling and isolation (which sounds like it has no plot, but I promise the plot COOKS). As a huge 2025 journaler, I thought it was very insightful about the different things journaling is: it’s your memory and a historical record and a form of self-expression, and then also this time-traveling social act that lets you be friends with your past self. A lot goes on there!

Also: Sometimes I feel some vague societal pressure to “stay busy, “ but there is nothing cooler to me than how Mr. Piranesi turns his solitary free time into a deep relationship with nature and his house. I feel like he sees the world around him more clearly and lovingly than any busy person.

2. Subway tuna subs

Listen, Subway serves REAL TUNA according to their Tuna Facts page, which starts with the giant relaxing headline “Subway Tuna Lawsuit Dismissed.” Whatever the nice smooth substance is that they serve, it tastes amazing. I like to get my tuna sub to go and add my own Dijon mustard at home :) #French

3. The Yoko Ono exhibit at the MCA (Chicago-only)

Sometimes it’s hard to think of something novel to do in a day, but not for Yoko Ono. She’s like “Why don’t you nail a strand of your hair to a board!” My dad and I went and saw this Yoko exhibit over Thanksgiving, and I was so inspired by her interactive, instructions-as-artwork project. Did she pave the way for TikTok dances with her… embodied memes? Is that something? Rando Chicagoans (plural!) definitely nailed their hairs to a board before my eyes, and my dad and I played a game of chess on an all-white Yoko chess set, where you couldn’t tell one player’s pieces from the other’s. It was VERY world-peace-coded. You were clearly supposed to say, “Well why even bother to play this war game when we’re all the same?” My dad and I played normally, and when I said, “How can you tell our pieces apart?” my dad said, “I just remember.” But then, out of respect for Yoko, he orchestrated a stalemate at the end of the game. World stalemate ✌️

4. This spatula

Or sorry, I guess it’s technically a Restaurant Turner. It feels insanely good to scrape it on a cast iron, and it gets “more underneath” my eggs than a normal spatula. I don’t know what I’m saying or who I’m quoting here, but I mean this with my whole heart.

5. Rereading my old workshop letter to the MFA’s most inscrutable poet

I reread a bunch of my old workshop letters from grad school this year for no real reason, and my favorite was my thesis seminar letter to our most inscrutable poet. I am not a strong poetry reader in the best of times, and his poems specifically involved a lot of references and vocabulary I didn’t understand. I was lost. It shows. Some highlights:

• “I had trouble telling why running water A was functioning differently (or if it even was different) from running water B,” I write.

  • What am I looking for here? It’s okay if there are 1-2 creeks and we don’t nail it down….

• “This collection is named after a Spanish musical tradition,” I notice, “but we don’t get poems set clearly in Spain, or much reference to man-made music, until towards the end.”

  • My literal prose-writing ass: “Why isn’t there a main character in your poetry collection whose name is also the title? Have you read Piranesi?”

• “Your poems are full of nature imagery, and these natural loops full eternal… [b]ut… IRL human activity is disrupting all of these cycles (except the sun) (the sun is doing OK),” I write.

  • Lol at me clinging to the one remotely relevant fact I know. Global warming does NOT hurt the sun. I heard it actually comes from the sun??? Have you guys heard this?

The letter is so unhelpful yet un-self-deprecating it becomes sort of HEROIC. It’s like: “Hello. I do not know, and it does not silence me. Here are my thoughts. Farewell.” Aragorn energy. But I think there’s something pro-social about openly communicating confusion, and receiving missives from the confused. More of this in 2026!

6. “Which One,” Drake and Central Cee

I listened to this joyous song about tradeoffs a lot this summer, and I have to say, I love when Drake patronizes women and pretends he’s from an island nation. I know he’s from Toronto and I just can’t care! I also love when Central Cee says “I’ve got a chopstick for your wonton.” Makes me feel like I don’t know how sex works. Or eating. Just one chopstick?

7. Sorry, Baby (HBO Max)

This movie is the funniest movie about sexual violence we may ever get. Great central friendship; great single woman x cat relationship. It’s impossible to spoil this film but I found it validating — as someone mystified by how bad ghosting feels (what is that???) — to learn that it can even strangely suck to get ghosted by your rapist. My favorite line read is “She said ‘Yum.’”

8. This one smoothie in Brooklyn

I did some detective work and I thinkkkk the smoothie is “Healing Turmeric Smoothie” at “Lively Brooklyn” in Park Slope. After I drank it, I wrote down the ingredients IN MY JOURNAL (normally reserved for feelings): hemp milk, banana, mango, turmeric, chia, cinnamon, ginger, and black pepper. This smoothie was $14 and worth at least $100. If you have these ingredients in your home please lord blend them together.

9. The Harper’s gooning article and Daniel Ortberg’s Substack about it

These two pieces of media, which I read in the order they are listed here, revealed to me that I am not the critical reader I hoped. I just felt… whatever the writer I was currently reading felt, about everything. So in the course of roughly an hour I went from “I’m so scared that strangers masturbate too hard” to “Haha remember when I was actively part of a moral panic 12 minutes ago?”

Ultimately, I think gooning is just not a good topic for journalism, or at least for Daniel Kolitz (Harper’s guy) (wow both authors are named Daniel!). Kolitz was too squeamish to verify most of his article’s claims — he just heard and repeated them. Like, when he goes to the goonparty, does he even know for sure it occurs once he leaves? No. So the story is ultimately about what people want to anonymously say about their masturbation habits, not the habits themselves. But I still enjoyed and recommend these two pieces in quick succession! An absolute rollercoaster.

10. Beth’s Dead

My coworker recommended this podcast to me and I absolutely devoured it, and paid $9 to get it faster than you normal peasants (even though I really only had to pay $4). It’s the story of two podcasters, a married couple, who shut down their very successful comedy podcast after a spooky situation with some listeners; in this show they reconstruct the events of the past and do some additional investigation in the present.

Apparently the pod has a lot of Reddit haters because it’s not 100% journalistic in its inquiries—but even though I was just hating on unverified information sentences ago, I don’t mind the lack of verification here. I do not think this is investigative journalism; it’s more of a two-author memoir about fear, and how we can get stuck in scary static beliefs about people we don’t know (for good reason!), but we also really want to trust each other! And it’s more of an animal thing than a documentation thing, in the end. When you think you’re looking for Answers you’re maybe really looking for a kind face or a certain tone of voice. This is true to my experience! Reminded me of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, in a way, with all the super zoomed-in, emotional play-by-play around Emailing. Also, I recently watched the 1994 and 2019 Little Women movies back to back and thought damn. Beth is dead in every universe!

11. Getting parented by my friends

When I visited my friend Kelsey this year, her daughter (age 2) really wanted to decide what shoes I wore one day. She kept bringing her chosen shoes over to me and placing them by my socked feet suggestively. Kelsey said something like, “We can invite Mae to wear those shoes, but it’s her decision what shoes she wears!” I now think about this a lot now in a variety of situations. We can invite, but we can’t insist! Forever relevant. I’m growing up.

12. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Netflix)

My dad and I both loved this documentary, and it’s hard to hit the middle of the Mae-Ed Venn diagram — he can’t get through even S1 of Fleabag because Fleabag (the character) is upsettingly unlikable to him (??????). This documentary is about a Norwegian guy, Mats Steen, with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He spends many years in a wheelchair, and dies at 25. The movie has two parts: his life story as observed by his family, and his life story reconstructed from World of Warcraft chats and records. It’s sort of like Piranesi, in that it’s about the life and records of a seemingly isolated person, and it makes isolation seem FULL of possibilities!

13. “Chun Swae,” Nicki Minaj ft. Swae Lee (in song and in ASL)

This is a great song to listen to when you need to feel confident and nothing else in about 3 minutes. (The Nicki promise! Also fulfilled by “Yikes.”) I saw a TikTok of a woman signing along to this song that put me in an (incredibly) MORE powerful headspace than the raw audio, and I was hooked and watched a bunch of her other videos. Then I wondered: am I just getting bamboozled by a rapidly-gesticulating woman? Idk what’s ASL. So I sent it to an ASL-fluent friend who confirmed it “looks legit,” although musical ASL is a little different from musicless ASL, and allows for more creative liberties—so not textbook, but not fake. Phew!

14. Hey Bagel (Seattle only)

This bagel place in Seattle (in a MALL?!) serves the best bagels I’ve ever had. I say this as someone who has been to New York (and famously drank a smoothie there), and eats every bagel I encounter in Chicago. I am literally considering buying a car so I can drive out and eat a Ka’ak bagel at Al Manakeesh in Bridgeview (?? where even is this).

But so far, Hey Bagel triumphs over all. Their bagels are so hot and fresh. Crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. It’s frankly annoying, because they not only sell a perfect product but act like they are the first bagel purveyor on earth. If you ask for cream cheese on your bagel, they’re like, “Sorry, you must be confused… cream cheese on a bagel? Our bagels are too hot and fresh and the cream cheese will fall right off. You must rip up your bagel and dip the bits in cream cheese.”

Hmm. How come everyone else can shmear their dang bagels, guys?

But then the rip and dip method is actually super good and as of recently, cosigned by Martha Stewart. Hey Bagel: infallible!

15. Titanique

This musical asks the important question: “What if Celine Dion was in the movie Titanic, and played herself, and kinda poked her nose into everything?” The answer is hilarious and the Celine Dion character in the show is the absolute queen of self-esteem and strutting and turning a French-Canadian accent up to 11.

Here are my Titanique texts with my friend who saw it first:

After the show I listened to “A New Day Has Come” on repeat until my ears hurt. Highly rec if it’s showing in your city!

16. Who’s the Clown?, Audrey Hobert

I loved this whole album. I often interact with music as a text — which is why I like rap and Taylor Swift and also why I’m a loser (it’s not a text!!) — and Audrey makes my perverse preference fun. She’s such a weird, granular storyteller that I even respect the skips (for me), like “Wet Hair” or “Bowling alley.”

I also think her public persona is cool because she is not trying to look the hottest she can look (or she would use volumizer) (and make her hair and face colors more different). I believe she is intentionally skipping hotmaxxing to instead look the most like the person who wrote her songs—a person who craves male validation that eludes her and thinks she has “a fucked-up face” and wants to get felt up when she’s drunk at the club (“Are you even allowed to say that?!” I gasped like Mr. Gooner Journalist when I first heard it). This works in a powerful way and gives her music extra heft. It also gives her access to a special Napoleon Dynamite vibe while dancing (and she knows!).

17. O Noir (Montreal only)

This is a pitch-black restaurant in Montreal, meant to give sighted people empathy for blind people, and also employ blind people—the waiters are all blind. The purity of the darkness in the dining room is… unforgettable. You can’t see your own hand in front of your face, or your food. Without any visual cues, I felt like I was floating, and I kept saying “I feel like I’m dead,” creating a wonderful mood for my dining companion. I had ice cream for dessert, and immediately spread it all over the tablecloth. I couldn’t see the edges of the bowl and I guess I have no internal sense of how big a bowl could and couldn’t be. Going here was humbling and wonderful. When I left the world and my eyes felt brand spanking new. The food is good but beside the point.

Reader q

What places and things brought you joy this year? Did you have strong reactions of agreement or disagreement to this list?

Would love to hear your thoughts and recs! Reply to this email or leave a comment at the button. Happy hols <3

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Taylor Swift has a new album! (I started this newsletter a long time ago, can you tell, lol. But walk with me!) To me The Life of a Showgirl feels a little thin and stale. I’m not motivated to listen to it more than once, so I can’t robustly support this claim, but oh well. I’m not here to Review the Album. I am here with a read on the only song on the album I like: “Father Figure.”

It brought me so much joy and reflection!

Before I get into why, let us pause to listen to the song (it’s 3 minutes) and consider: Who are the father and progeny here?

[LISTENING BREAK]

One internet read is that this is a song about her masters, and the father in the early verses is Scott Borchetta or Scooter or whoever, some old business guy, addressing/”mentoring” baby Taylor. But by the end of the song the speaker (and the owner of Taylor’s masters) has changed. She’s daddy now!

This feels a little convoluted, but okay.

Another hypothesis: The song is about her relationship with Olivia Rodrigo, who Taylor ripped off as much as Olivia ever ripped her off? But I guess Taylor could still be mad.

I choose to walk a different path here. I read “Father Figure” as one more diss track about Taylor’s most recent ex, Matty Healy (lead singer of The 1975) (subject of The Tortured Poets Department, “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” etc.).

Viewed in this light it is very delightful and interesting.

Why it’s delightful:

• Casting a man who casually broke your heart as your lackluster mentee in a song — something funny and true in that.

• The song is obviously referencing “Father Figure” by George Michael, which had its most recent cultural moment in Babygirl, a movie about a hetero workplace affair with a power imbalance that favors the woman. But that doesn’t mean CEO Nicole Kidman comes out on top or controls the trajectory of the relationship. Feels like a good, complicating reference in an otherwise triumphant, big-dog song.

• Key change for “whose portrait’s on the mantle?” !!!!!!

• This song feels In Conversation with something Matty said in 2016: “I am NOT being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend… you know, FUCK. THAT. That’s also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing.” (The comment lives on in secondary sources, but the original has been meticulously scrubbed from the internet… Tree Paine, is that you?) “Father Figure” strikes me as playing with this comment: “You’re right son, I was always daddy.” Love to see an alternative to the “Woman shrilly contesting a sexist comment” role.

• Saying “you remind me of a younger me” to a man exactly your age, in your industry… one of the sickest burns ever.

• Fun to see Taylor Swift, one of THEE most cisgender women we have, strap it on a little. It’s nothing groundbreaking, and nothing Nicki Minaj hasn’t done more and better and 10+ years ago, but genderbending is edgy in the context of Taylor Swift’s brand. She literally sold a “Life of a Showgirl cardigan box set” this album cycle. A showgirl… cardigan… an object playing so safe it doesn’t even make sense.

Why it’s interesting:

To me, “Father Figure” loudly echoes… Kanye West’s “Famous.” Uh oh!

To review, “Famous” is the song Taylor hated so much that it restarted her feud with Kanye and started her feud with Kim Kardashian. The GQ scoop and the phone recording leaks that sent Taylor spiraling into her Reputation era — that was all about “Famous,” and whether she approved these two Kanye lines about her / the 2009 VMAs mic grab:

I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex
Why? I made that bitch famous

Now, in “Father Figure,” she’s not exactly telling us “I made that bitch famous,” though she was repping The 1975 in 2014 and there’s a case to be made. The claim is a little more mournful: “I tried to make that bitch famous.”

She did. She made a surprise cameo at a The 1975 show in 2023, and the band was slated to open for her EU leg of The Eras Tour, iirc, up until she and Matty broke up. (Tree! You made a source hard to find on that.)

But ultimately, Taylor’s efforts backfired. Matty left their relationship widely disliked, after he made an appearance on a podcast where he made comments / laughed along with jokes that people read as racist, sexist, homophobic, and disrespectful to Ice Spice. The vibes were so bad Matty started watching what he says?!! The ultimate depression symptom, for him.

But seriously, people were mad. Not Ice Spice… but Swifties. A lot of Swifties who had discovered his existence ~2 days prior. To them, his comments and snickerings on the podcast were his first and only utterances. Stripped of context in Taylor World, he experienced the extreme end of natural PR consequences for what he said.

So yes, Taylor did help Matty’s career by dating him while wayyyy more famous than him, and connecting him with a new audience. She did make some (audibly rushed!) efforts to “cover up [his] scandals.” But I’d say she also put him in a uniquely vulnerable professional position by surrounding him with a fandom that wasn’t his.

Like “Famous,” it all makes a person wonder what constitutes a professional favor.

Ultimately, I think Taylor and Matty lived a reality HR has been telling us about for decades: It’s hard to be close, or even helpful, across huge power differentials. The lines between support and control and abuse blur, as Taylor herself chronicles in songs like “All Too Well” and “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve”; she captures the blurring most insightfully when she’s on the losing end of a power imbalance.

In “Father Figure,” she takes on the winner role and blurs history in her favor even more than Kanye does in “Famous” — casting herself as the betrayed, benevolent hero. In “Famous,” Kanye’s just a benevolent hero… but no one is betrayed. Life is fun and hopeful. They might still have sex!

(I find the “Famous” lyrics pretty gross, but in a similar way to “Actually Romantic.” Why are we sexualizing these vulnerable, sexless moments — the VMAs mic grab and “Sympathy is a knife,” respectively??? It’s weird.)

Now I don’t want to be too hard on Taylor for the (possible) punching-down moment in “Father Figure.” She says Matty ghosted her, and after they had known each other a long time. That hurts BAD and warps your judgment. I also think “Father Figure” is sort of tongue in cheek, a bit “Blank Space”; “Matty thinks I’m some freaking mafia don careerist because I worked hard on my tour, lol.”

But here’s my closing thought: I think Taylor very primally wants people to understand her feelings. It’s why she writes confessional songs, and why they’re good. And sometimes, to feel understood, people end up inflicting their feelings on other people without even meaning to. It’s like… an effort to connect?

I was recently reading an article largely unrelated to Taylor Swift, “The Pain of Perfectionism,” and this passage stood out to me:

The analyst Elizabeth Spillius wrote about a time when she felt that sessions with one patient were going badly; then she realized that her perfectionist patient was subtly “trying to make me want to be perfect and then to feel discouraged and despairing, just as she expected herself to be perfect and was constantly disappointing herself.”

The patient’s trying to induce her feelings in her therapist, instead of just verbally describing them. I see a bit of this in “Father Figure,” too. It’s a diss track that’s also a bid for connection: Taylor strikes a Kanye pose and feels a little of how he felt making “Famous.” Taylor makes Matty the unwilling subject of a powerful person’s mentorship anthem, so he can know how she felt hearing “Famous.”

We’re all getting to know each other forever, I guess! Even after it seems like we’re done.

Question for readers

What did you think of The Life of a Showgirl and “Father Figure”?

Linxxx

• I started liking another TLOAS song, oops.

• Do you want to read EVEN MORE of my thoughts about Taylor Swift? Well here you go and seek treatment.

• The GOAT Taylor Swift fan zine. Thanks Tavi!

• “Matty Healy… took over the DJ booth to play ‘Call Me Maybe’ while smoking a cigarette.”

• I love freshly-sober Matty on equine therapy (4:46).

• Honestly, bars.

• Random product rec: this hair mask is AMAZING.

I’ll write a research memo about new/scary Trump policies for ya — reply to this newsletter to request!